A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Lenaerts, Karolien; Beblavý, Miroslav; Fabo, Brian Article Prospects for utilisation of non-vacancy Internet data in labour market analysis: An overview IZA Journal of Labor Economics Provided in Cooperation with: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics Suggested Citation: Lenaerts, Karolien; Beblavý, Miroslav; Fabo, Brian (2016) : Prospects for utilisation of non-vacancy Internet data in labour market analysis: An overview, IZA Journal of Labor Economics, ISSN 2193-8997, Springer, Heidelberg, Vol. 5, Iss. 1, pp. 1-18, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40172-016-0042-z This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/152364 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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IZA Journal of Labor Economics (2016) 5:1 DOI 10.1186/s40172-016-0042-z ORIGINAL ARTICLE Open Access Prospects for utilisation of non-vacancy Internet data in labour market analysis—an overview Karolien Lenaerts1* , Miroslav Beblavý1 and Brian Fabo1,2 * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract 1Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS, Brussels), CEPS, 1 Place du Along with the advancement of the Internet in the last decade, researchers have Congrés, 1000 Brussels, Belgium increasingly identified the web as a research platform and a data source, pointing Full list of author information is out its value for labour market analysis. This article presents a review of online data available at the end of the article sources for this field. Specifically, the article introduces web-based research, focusing on the potential of relatively new data sources such as Google Trends, social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) and Glassdoor (surveys). For these data sources, a review is done and recent empirical applications are listed. Web-based data can further our understanding of the dynamics of the labour market. JEL codes: E4, J2 Keywords: Labour market, Web-based research, Data sources, Google Trends, Social networking sites, Glassdoor 1 Introduction The last few decades have been characterised by an astonishing advancement of the Internet, which has substantially transformed many aspects of life. As a result, the number of Internet users has skyrocketed. A recent report by the International Telecommunications Union shows that at the end of 2014, almost three billion people had access to the Internet (ITU 2014). Globally, close to 44 % of households have Internet access at home. The economic and societal changes that result from these developments are consid- erable and have attracted the attention from academics and policymakers. Along with the advancement of the Internet, researchers have increasingly shown interest in the worldwide web, not only as a research subject but also as a potential data source. This interest has not been limited to a single field but stretches out across many different domains. In the discipline of economics, labour economics has been identified as a field for which web-based data are particularly promising. In their seminal papers, Kuhn and Skuterud (2004) and Askitas and Zimmermann (2009, 2015) argue that web data could be very valuable to do research on the labour market. The Internet has transformed the labour market in many ways. Autor (2001) identifies three dimensions through which the web has affected the labour market: how firms and workers search for each other (e.g. employers look for “passive” candidates, on-the-job search), how © 2016 Lenaerts et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Lenaerts et al. IZA Journal of Labor Economics (2016) 5:1 Page 2 of 18 labour services are delivered (e.g. skills required online) and how local labour demand is shaped (e.g. impact of e-commerce). Technological change indeed has greatly affected job search, application, selection and matching (Carnevale et al. 2014; Kuhn 2014; Kuhn and Mansour 2014). A recent survey suggests that 80 % of the HR teams use social media when hiring new employees (Konetic 2014). In this article, we aim to provide an overview of novel web-based data sources and their potential as sources for labour market research. In this way, we aspire to contrib- ute to the literature on the link between the Internet and the labour market. There already is a large and quickly growing body of literature on the use of data from job portals for labour market analysis. Indeed, in this very issue of IZA JOLE, there is a paper by Kureková et al. (2015) on the methodological issues involved in using vacan- cies from job portals (and also, to a lesser degree, the WageIndicator survey). For this reason, we decided to survey other sources of data. While these sources have not been ignored by researchers, their utilisation has been lower, and there is also a lack of survey literature bringing together all strands. We therefore describe alternative data sources covering the supply, demand or both sides of the labour market and explain why we are convinced of the potential of these data as excellent platforms and sources for labour market research. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. In Section 2, a brief overview of web-based research is presented. The section first discusses how the Internet became more prominent as a research platform and data source. To this end, the section includes an analysis of early web-based work. As a second step, a series of relatively new web-based data sources is described. These sources comprise data extracted from online job boards and intermediaries, Google Trends, social networks and surveys. Sections 3, 4 and 5 present more details on the new data sources. In each of these sec- tions, first, the data source is described and then empirical applications that make use of the source are surveyed. We consider not only articles published in scientific jour- nals but also prospective work and other contributions. We examine how the data source is, or could be, used for labour market analysis. Section 3 introduces Google Trends. In Section 4, we focus on three social networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Section 5 deals with web-based surveys and Glassdoor in particular. Section 6 of the article summarises our findings and outlines some paths for future research. 2 Using the Internet as a data source for labour market analysis With the growth of the Internet and its increasing coverage across countries and socio- demographic groups, the web itself has become an interesting research subject and a tool for data compilation. Hooley et al. (2012) therefore distinguish between studies that cover the Internet and studies that make use of the Internet to conduct research but note that these two domains actually are strongly connected. The earliest studies were mostly of the first type, with research that focused on the social dimension of the web (Freeman 1984; Finholt and Sproull 1990). Shortly after these first studies, work that used the Internet to do analyses emerged (Kiesler and Sproull 1986; Kehoe and Pitkow 1996; Foster 1994). As the field expanded, new approaches and data collec- tion methods were developed, which oftenwerestronglyembeddedintheexisting methodological framework and enriched with insights from technological progress. Lenaerts et al. IZA Journal of Labor Economics (2016) 5:1 Page 3 of 18 Online research can take many forms. In their book, Hooley et al. (2012) concentrate on four types: surveys, interviews and focus groups, ethnographies, and experiments. Surveys were among the first research activities performed online. In fact, the first recorded email survey was done in 1986 (Kiesler and Sproull 1986) and the first recorded web survey in 1994 (Kehoe and Pitkow 1996). Compared to traditional paper- and-pencil methods, online surveys have the advantage to be flexible, fast, cheap and easy to set up. Data can be collected from a larger and more diverse sample, which has a positive impact on data accuracy. At the same time, the anonymity of the respondents is ensured. Web surveys are also easier to analyse than traditional surveys. Disadvan- tages of online surveys include sample bias, measurement error, non-response and dropout, and other technical and ethical issues. For the USA, there are two Internet panel surveys that we wanted to bring to the reader’s attention: RAND’s American Life Panel (ALP) (6000 participants) (https://alpdata.rand.org/index.php?page=main) and the Understanding America Study (UAS) panel (2500 participants, CESR, University of Southern California, http://static.usc.edu/sites/files/UAS_Brochure.pdf). Both panels are representative for the US population of ages 18 and up.